Kuala Lumpur

“There’s no more rule of law,” said Mahathir Mohamad, the 90-year-old grandee who was prime minister of Malaysia for 22 years. “The only way for the people to get back to the old system is for them to remove this prime minister.”

Mahathir has been openly criticising the current prime minister, Najib Razak, for the past year although they both belong to the same political party, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO). What made it special this time was that he said it at a two-day mass demonstration in the centre of Kuala Lumpur.

Mass demonstrations are normally attacked and dispersed by the police in Malaysia despite its formally democratic system, but this time the police remained peaceful. There were the usual disputes about how many people were there, with the organisers claiming 300,000 and the police saying 20,000, but the important thing was that Mahathir showed up and gave it his support.

There’s certainly good reason to demand Najib Razak’s resignation as prime minister. In July the Wall Street Journal published a report that $700 million had been transferred into his personal bank accounts in 2013 by the deeply indebted 1MDB state investment fund, which he created in 2009 shortly after becoming prime minister. He remains chairman of the fund’s board of advisers even today.

At first Najib just denied it all. He fired his deputy prime minister, Muhyiddin Yassin, for criticising his handing of the affair, and also the attorney general, Abdul Gani Patail, who was leading the the investigation into the scandal. Then, when it became impossible to deny that the money had appeared in his accounts, his advisers began claiming that it had come not from 1MDB but as a “political donation” from unnamed Middle Eastern sources.

Whether it was really looted from the 1MDB investment fund or just given to Najib by a “wealthy Arab family”, its purpose was clear. It was not to enrich Najib personally. It was to swing the outcome of the 2013 election, which Najib’s party was in danger of losing.

In a normal democracy, accepting the better part of a billion dollars from foreigners to win an election would be just as serious a crime as stealing it from a national investment fund, but Malaysia is not a normal democracy. It has been effectively a single-party state since independence in 1957, because the great majority of ethnic Malays vote for UMNO and its allies in order to retain their special privileges in the country.

Malays, who are almost all Muslims, were the original population in most of the country and still account for 60 percent of its people. However, large-scale immigration by Chinese and Indians in the 19th century shifted the balance: Chinese Malaysians now account for about a quarter of the population, and people of Indian descent for around one-tenth.

Moreover, it is the Chinese who dominate the country economically, a fact that led to the bloody race riots of 1969. Since then, Malays have enjoyed cheaper housing, priority in government jobs and business licenses, and in practice (though no longer in theory) better access to university courses, in order to help them catch up economically with the Chinese and Indian populations.

The policy has had some success: average household incomes have converged, with Malay families going from about 40 percent of Chinese family earnings in 1970 to around 70 percent in 2009. Most Malays nevertheless feel this institutionalised favouritism is still necessary, and vote UMNO to protect it – while a majority of Chinese and Indian Malaysians undoubtedly feel that half a century of extra privileges for Malays is enough.

That’s why the great majority of protesters at last weekend’s demonstration in Kuala Lumpur were ethnically Chinese or Indian. Najib’s financial misdeeds provided a justification for the protest, and even many Malays want to see the back of Najib, but the Malays stayed away because they detect a deeper agenda in the protest movement.

Matters are further complicated by the fact that all Malays are Muslims whereas practically nobody else is. Mahathir was exploiting the demo in order to further his campaign to unseat Najib in an internal conflict within UMNO, but he certainly does not want to end the Malay-Muslim domination of the country’s politics or dismantle Malay privileges.

“What is 20,000 (demonstrators)? We can gather hundreds of thousands,” said Najib after the demonstration. “The rest of the Malaysian population is with the government.” Or at least most Malays are, especially in rural areas, and that’s probably enough for him to ride out this crisis unless Malaysia’s economic situation worsens.

The Malaysian economy has slowed down dramatically since Chinese demand for imports and the price of oil both began to collapse. Malaysia’s currency, the ringgit, is in free-fall. If it gets bad enough, Najib will have to go.

Whatever the injustices involved, it’s probably better for everybody that the ethnic can of worms stays firmly closed for a while yet, so UMNO should be thinking hard about a successor who will be acceptable to everybody.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 3 and 12. (“Mass…support”; and “Matters…privileges”)

In the late 80s, when I was in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, a friend suggested that I drive out into the desert near Jubail to see the oldest extant Christian church in the world. And there it was, surrounded by a chain-link fence to keep casual visitors and foreign archaeologists out. Experts who saw the site before it was closed said that the church was built by Nestorian Christians, and was probably used from the 4th to the 9th century.

Its existence embarrassed the Saudi government, which prefers to believe that Arabia went straight from paganism to Islam. But it confirmed the assumption of most historians that Christianity was flourishing in the Arabian Peninsula in the centuries before the rise of Islam. So what did these Arabic-speaking Christians call God? Allah, of course.

I mention this because last week the Malaysian High Court struck down a three-year old ban on non-Muslims using the word Allah when they speak of God in the Malay language. The court’s decision was followed by firebomb attacks on three Christian churches in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday night, and on Friday protesters at mosques in Kuala Lumpur carried placards reading “Allah is only for us.”

Prime Minister Najib Razak condemned the attacks on the churches, but he supports the ban on Christians using the word “Allah” in Malay and is appealing the High Court decision.

“We…have the right to use the word ‘Allah’,” said Rev. Lawrence Andrew, the editor of the Herald, the newspaper of the Catholic Church in Malaysia, whose use of the word in its Malay-language edition triggered the crisis. Parliamentary opposition leader Lim Kit Siang simply observed that “The term ‘Allah’ was used to refer to God by Arabic-speaking Christians before Arabic-speaking Muslims existed.”

Of course it was. Arabic-speaking Christians predate the rise of Islam by three hundred years, and what else were they going to call God? The word “Allah” is a contraction of the Arabic definite article al- and the noun ‘ilah, which means god. In parts of ancient Arabia it once referred to the creator-god (who was not the only god), but for a very long time it has meant the One God.

This Arabic word was imported into the Malay language by converts to Islam, which arrived in the region several centuries before Christianity. All ethnic Malays are considered to be Muslim under Malaysian law, but there are numerous Malay-speakers, especially in northern Borneo, who are Christian and not ethnically Malay. They also use the word Allah for God.

What’s the harm in that? Why are Malaysia’s Muslims so paranoid? The real paranoia, alas, is ethnic.

Malaysia is an ethnic time-bomb that has turned itself into a peaceful and prosperous country by a huge effort of will. The original population was mostly Malay, but under British rule huge numbers of Indian and Chinese immigrants were imported to work the mines and plantations. By independence, Malays were only 60 percent of the population, and much poorer than the more recent arrivals. They resented the past, the present, and the probable future.

After several bouts of savage anti-Chinese and anti-Indian rioting, the country arrived at its current, highly successful compromise. The Malays dominate politics, but the Chinese and the Indians thrive in trade and commerce – and most people understand that they are ultimately in the same boat, which is called Malaysia.

The state spends a lot of money to raise the living standards of the Malays, and gives them preference for university places and government jobs. They haven’t done badly out of this deal, but nevertheless they feel perpetually insecure. Since they are all Muslims, while few other Malaysians are, they also feel their religion is under threat. Some respond by being aggressively intolerant of minorities.

Not all Malays behave this way. Major Muslim organisations, including the Islamic political party, PAS, have agreed that the other “Abrahamic religions” – Christians and Jews – may call their God Allah in Malay. But it’s getting ugly, and it’s high time for the Malaysian government to stop playing along with the extremists.

It should take a lesson from the early Muslims of Arabia. Both the archaeological and the textual evidence suggest that most Arabs in northern Arabia and along the Gulf coast had already been Christian for several centuries when Islam first appeared in the 7th century. They were swiftly conquered by Muslim armies, but they were not forcibly converted.

As in all early Islamic empires, Christians had to pay higher taxes, but they were allowed to keep their property and practice their religion. It is highly improbable that they were forced to change the word they used for God. They did gradually convert to Islam, but the last Christian churches in the region probably survived into the early 9th century.

The Christians, Hindus, animists and others who make up 40 percent of Malaysia’s people pay higher taxes, in the sense that they subsidise the poorer Malay/Muslim majority. Few of them will ever convert to Islam, but they are not its enemy either. Malaysia has achieved a fragile but workable compromise that gives its people a good life. It should not endanger it so frivolously.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

Note: I realise that this article may not be suitable for publication by papers in some Muslim countries, but I trust that it will not cause offence. If you need a reference on Christians in 4th-7th century Arabia, the best is a scholarly article by John A. Langfeld, “Recently Discovered Early Christian Monuments in Northeastern Arabia,” published in Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy, 1994: 5: pp. 32-60. It is available online (Wiley InterScience), but you have to pay to view it.